Framestore

A quick history lesson about today's guest lecture

1986: framestore started by focusing on commercials, music videos, television graphics.

1994: A film and visual effects department was established, at the time they had the largest visual effect and computer animation studio

Present day: they arguably one of the best visual effects company in the world with offices in London, LA, New York and Chicago. They are also the 1st production house to have a dedicated VR studio.

The lecturer today day was one that I've been looking forward to for some time as the mutilated of work framestore has done is amazing, they of course worked on Were the wild things are, The Martian, Doctor strange, Children of men, War horse more excellently there working on Alien convent and Blade runner 2049. One new thing I learnt about framestore is that they do a lot of work for television commercials something that fall under the radar a lot of the time.

Framestore industry standard lighting practices

For the legend of Tarzan, they had different templates of the same gorilla with different shades of lighting.

Common problem's with lighting are:

Using too many lights

Very noise renders

Scaled area lights

Light in side geometry

Blacks are too black

Match the blacks onto the plates

They use a verity of programs:

Arnold (each production house uses Arnold but with different techies) They primarily use Arnold as its very flexible and quick, physically accurate, handles huge amount of geometry and its very easy to use from an artist point of view.

Maya

FRibGrn

Working in a production pipeline means you have to be able to work with different departments:

Tracking

Modelling

Animation

FX (Which can be the most challenging as each morning and afternoon you have to have meeting and re-watch the footage)

Composting (Lighting work very closely as they have to make sure very thing is perfect before they render)

Production (At the start of any new project a list of targets is drawn up that have to be achieved at the end of each week)